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THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA

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HISTORY:

  The largest engineering and

building project ever carried out by humans is the Great Wall of China. It stretches about 1,500 miles. Parts of it date back to the 4th century BC. The major work on the wall came during the Ch'in Dynasty, which lasted from 221 to 206 BC. [And for which the CHINese got their name.]

  The emperor Shih Huang Ti had

united the different parts of the country into one China in about 214 BC. He ordered the existing sections of wall to be connected to form one long wall as a protection against invading nomads, or wandering tribes, from the north. Since that time it has been extended, rebuilt many times, and destroyed in part. It still stands and has become one of the major tourist attractions in the world.

  The wall is simple in structure. It

is built of dirt, stone, and brick. Its height ranges from 15 to 30 feet with watchtowers rising at regular intervals above it. It is 15 to 25 feet wide. Along the top runs a 12-foot-wide roadway. Behind the wall there are at intervals permanent camps for troops.

  The wall's use as a defensive

barrier ended when a Ming Emperor arranged a marriage between his daughter and the grandson of Genghis Khan. The "Great Khan" whom Marco Polo met was their son. Parts of the wall fell into disrepair, but in the late 19th century parts were rebuilt by the last Chinese dynasty as a cultural monument. (And tourist attraction!)

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ABOUT THE PHOTOS:

  I took the photos in 1982. This

part is Badaling Pass, about 50 miles northwest of Beijing and the major restored section. The fort at the top of the pass guarded the only road access to Beijing and was one of the largest posts.

  At about 6-7000 feet elevation in a

semi-arid area, nothing much but pine scrub grows here, and it's hard to figure out how all the workers and troops were fed and housed. Winters are cold with little or no snow, summers are hot with little or no rain.

THIS PICTURE:

 Beyond the height of land the Wall 

is not as well restored. What you see here might be a more realistic example of what it really was. In this direction it is a real wall for another 200 miles or so, then fades into strings of mounds and earth. Stone and brick was valuable and hard to get. Much like Hadrian's Wall in Britain, many buildings along the way are built from salvaged stone.

  The couple in foreground are

tourists from Harbin, way up on the Russian border. He's Chinese, she's Russian. Neither speak Chinese very well, but both fluent in four+ other languages. "Northerners" in China tend to be burly six-footers, sometimes with blue eyes. Beyond the Wall the gene pool is still somewhat different.

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[Photo #2 of 2]

  Hope you enjoyed the pix and all 

these notes. Pix were from an ordinary pocket camera, I recently had them put on PHOTO-CD. This is best compromise I could make between filesize and decent resolution. Sorry about the sky, got a bit wrong when I converted to GIF.

 Would like feedback on how these

look on your screen. Each pic is set for about 800x600x256, gamma 2.2.

  Can supply techie-info or hi-rez

24-bit copies of these and others. Format of your choice, but I like JPEG, it makes small files.

  I have some other scenics, swap for 

good rail pix, especially steam.

<DLSwank@aol.com> -dls May1995-